


Walk in the Waves

by Meilan_Firaga



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Beginnings, Budding Love, F/F, Meet-Cute, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 13:24:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15886917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meilan_Firaga/pseuds/Meilan_Firaga
Summary: Felicity leads a fairly boring life as the technical expert on a marine research project, but there's something she's searching for in the depths. What happens when the depths come up to say hello?





	Walk in the Waves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shopfront](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shopfront/gifts).



Felicity Smoak was not the usual candidate for marine biology. Sure, she was intelligent enough for the work. Her grades had always been top of the class, and she was quite the pioneer when it came to the tech she worked on for the research crew she’d joined. Only, she was better dealing with technology than anything alive, her babble had to be constantly reined in by her coworkers, and—probably most importantly—she didn’t actually know how to swim. Even her team didn’t believe she belonged with them. It was an altogether lonely choice of career, but she couldn’t even consider doing anything else. Her father had been a marine biologist. He was renowned—or, at least, he had been before he’d started insisting that he’d seen a mermaid and the entire scientific community had written him off as a hack.

Honestly, if it were a matter of clearing her father’s name within his field she would have written it off as a fool’s errand by the time she was twelve. Nothing ever came of those kinds of stories but sorrow and daddy issues. The problem was that her father hadn’t been the only one who’d seen the mermaid. No, he’d spotted the creature while out on a hike near the rocky shore with his only daughter. Felicity had seen the beautiful woman with the fish’s tail on the rocks just as he had, and she’d spent her life ever since both trying to prove it and to see a mermaid again. 

It might not have been the best thing to base a career path on.

That thought was what found Felicity wandering along the wharf one evening alone. She dragged her feet through the sand just far enough from the water that she didn’t get wet. Everyone always told her she was a bit paranoid with her refusal to actually put her feet in the sea, but she’d studied every myth imaginable. She knew all the ways that creatures would tempt mortals to the depths, and she wasn’t about to take such a foolish risk as to have one foot in their realm. Maybe she was a little paranoid, but she was also in charge of herself completely.

Not, of course, that she’d seen anything to be paranoid about. She hadn’t had another encounter or even a promising lead at finding another mermaid since the day she’d taken that hike with her father. So, she’d resigned herself to managing sonar tech and building the best equipment for the research team. They were doing a study on the reef that ran along the coastline, which let them have a base on the shore where Felicity could manage her tech remotely. It wasn’t thrilling, but the team agreed to help fund and drop the deep diving robots she was using for her own research. She just wished she could get anywhere on her own plans. One of her robots had disappeared in the depths. The last thing on camera before it went offline was a flash of a shiny black fin. No amount of cross referencing had managed to identify the species, but it just wasn’t substantial enough.

“You look deep in thought.”

Felicity jumped, eyes darting around as she turned from side to side to take in her surroundings. She’d wandered down the beach for quite a ways to a more remote area of the coastline. There was no one else on the beach and no bathers in the water. It was late enough in the evening that no one would risk going out on the tide. And then she saw her: blonde hair spilling over arms and shoulders out of the water resting against a rock. Her eyes were a brilliant shade of blue, and they were focused directly on Felicity. 

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Yes, you did,” Felicity blurted out before she could stop herself. “I mean, not that I think you intentionally pop up on beaches to scare random IT specialists but you totally meant to startle me. Otherwise you wouldn’t have said anything at all. And if you meant to startle me that means you have something you want from me and I have no idea what that could be.” She managed to rein in the babble, but she couldn’t stop herself from staring. “Are you real or am I hallucinating?”

The woman in the water smiled, and a black fin flipped up above the waves behind her. She slipped one hand beneath the water. When she raised it again, she was holding Felicity’s lost robot. “I believe this is yours?”

“What, you have full computer setups down there that let you trace it back to me?”

The mermaid smiled. “I’m not sure what that is.” She pushed herself out of the water just far enough to toss the robot farther onto the shore. It landed with a thump on the sand just past the tide. “You don’t seem surprised to see me, and whatever that thing is was clearly hunting for my people. Logical leap to think it’s yours.”

Felicity couldn’t help but smile. “I saw one of your people with my father when I was a little girl.”

“And now you want to prove our existence to the rest of your world? Let us be hunted and studied?” Her eyes were ice as she said it, hard and cold.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Felicity insisted, waving her hands furiously. “I don’t want anything like that. I mean, even if I did nobody takes my work seriously. It’s almost impossible for me to get any sort of funding, so I basically build all my robots with my own money that I earn by running tech for other studies, and I don’t exactly publish anything because, you know, I don’t really have any findings to publish and—”

“You’re cute,” the mermaid told her with a wry smile, and a very different kind of nervous butterflies fluttered in Felicity’s chest. “My name is Sara.”

For the next two months Felicity saw Sara nearly every day. In the evenings when the research base closed up shop she would wander down the coast to the same set of rocks where they’d first talked, and they would talk for hours. She learned so much about mermaid culture. Sara was a warrior, charged with watching her people’s borders and keeping an eye on the neighboring surface dwellers to make sure they were not discovered. Felicity once asked if Sara was going to lure her down to the depths with song only to be laughingly told that the siren song hadn’t been in much use since human technology began to seriously progress in the last hundred years. It was too much of a risk. 

“Why do you come every day?” Sara asked one night when they had just finished a discussion about dolphin racing. “Don’t you have people of your own to spend time with?”

“Oh, not really.” Felicity shrugged. “Only my mother, and we don’t exactly see eye to eye.”

“You didn’t answer my other question.”

With a deep breath, Felicity stumbled her way through her answer. “I’ve always felt like I’m meant for something different than this, you know? Like our world up here isn’t the only one worth knowing anything about. I’d rather know about your world.”

Sara smiled and stretched her torso up out of the water, leaning toward the rock where Felicity sat on the shore. “You can’t learn much more from up here, even if I come and tell you stories every day.”

“I can’t exactly go home with you, either,” Felicity told her, cocking an eyebrow over her glasses. “Even if it weren’t for the whole breathing problem I don’t know how to swim.”

“And if I knew a way to fix both problems?”

Felicity’s breath caught. Images that Sara’s stories had crafted of the beautiful undersea kingdom flashed across her mind. To see what she’d only been able to imagine… “But you can’t, right? I mean, you’re a mermaid and I’m human and that’s just the way it is.”

“How quickly humans forget,” Sara mused, her laugh a tinkling bell that Felicity had grown very fond of. “For all your technology, all your science and tricks, you’ve forgotten the other things that exist in the world.”

“There’s no proof that magic exists.”

“Are my people not proof enough?” She reached out a hand, her palm turned up. “Would you let me prove it to you?” Felicity worried her bottom lip between her teeth, but all of her reservations melted under the warmth of Sara’s gaze. With a deep breath she slipped her hand into the mermaid’s and stepped into the surf.


End file.
